Indicators help learners to organise, orientate and navigate through complex environments by providing contextual information relevant for the performance of learning tasks. Smart indicator systems adapt their approach of information aggregation and indication according to a learner’s situation or context. In this paper context is used as temporal context of the learning progress. This paper introduces an experimental scenario in which smart indicators are applied. The following section provides a definition of smart indicators that is derived from concepts of self-regulated learning and context-aware systems. Based on this definition a system’s architecture for smart indicators is proposed. Based on the preceding sections, the two problems of the research questions are addressed by discussing the implementation as it is used for the experimental scenario. This paper concludes with an analysis of current learning standards regarding the applicability in the domain of open communities.